Fantom’s Geek Holiday Contest

Fantom’s Geek Holiday Contest

We’re looking for creative folks to give us the next Back to the Future Day

Every hear of this holiday?

What about this one?

We’re pretty sure you have. And if you’re anything like us you’ve heard about some random holiday and thought I could do better than that!! Well, here’s your chance. Fantom is putting on a contest for the best Geek themed holidays. Here’s what you’ll win:

The 2 winning holidays are guaranteed at least 2 years worth of celebrations at Fantom. We’ll put the full resources of our social media machine behind it and hold celebrations in-store on the day of. If we can do it right we hope to kickstart the holiday to national – or even international – prominence

Free drinks at every celebration we host for your holiday

A $50 gift card at Fantom Comics

Here’s how it goes:

STEP 1: SUBMISSION (deadline: Sunday, April 16th). Submit your holiday to us at fantomhq@fantomcomics.com with the EXACT subject line of: New Holiday. Please be exact or we might overlook your email.

What We Need: At this stage your proposal doesn’t need to be pretty. We’ll be reviewing all submissions and approving the ones we feel would be best based not on presentation but on the criteria listed below. Here’s the information we’ll need:

Geekiness. Your submission does not have to be comic book based, but it does need to be pop-culture based.

Broad Appeal.Back to the Future Day was definitely geeky…but it sparked a lot of interest with the general public and so it is exactly the kind of thing we’re looking for…except, you know, that holiday could only happen once, on the day Marty arrived in the future. We want something we can celebrate annually. Perhaps a more relevant example is this one: one of our customers (who, if he’s reading this, should enter the contest) celebrates Hans Gruber Day with his friends each year. This is a fantastic example for what we’re looking for as the holiday is pop-culture based yet has strong broad appeal because everyone knows Die Hard, and Hans Gruber spawned a thousand imitators. Yet the holiday isn’t in-your-face like a Die Hard Day would be. It’s subtle. Die Hard Day seems phoned-in…Hans Gruber Day seems inspired.

Traditions. What is expected on your holiday? Thanksgiving has turkey; the 4th of July has fireworks; Festivus has the airing of grievances. What does your holiday have to do and why is it relevant to the day? Offering no traditions is bad; giving us too many is bad. Give us two or three or maybe four. Make them relevant, fun and replicable (don’t require us to drive a stake through vampire hearts on Buffy Day because that just ain’t gonna happen)

STEP 2: PRESENTATION (Saturday, May 13th). Once we’ve got our top contenders the winners will be alerted and have several weeks to put together an in-store presentation. We’ll throw an event and you’ll put on a 5-minute presentation of your holiday and why it should be celebrated. Everyone present will get to vote for their favorite, and each in-person vote will count as 10 votes. Here is where presentation will certainly matter.

STEP 3: ONLINE VOTING. The day after the presentation we’ll post the finalists for on-line voting, using a single image you provide boiling down all of the important points. Voting will go on for 2 weeks, at which point we’ll announce the 2 winners and start preparing to celebrate the occasions.

There you go! A chance at immortality and free drinks. Good luck!

Small print: Once you submit your holiday, you acknowledge that Fantom can do with it as it likes. We have no intention of trademarking it or making any profit off of it other than what we might make by celebrating it in our own community, but we’re free to do so as we see fit.